Apnas Review – A brilliant British Asian crime drama that blends family tensions with familiar thrills | film

A Clearly, a large portion of this film’s budget was thrown into the opening scenes: set at a lavish British-Pakistani wedding, a shiny Lamborghini snakes around the venue like a polished snake. (It helps that the voiceover explains that guests often rent their cars for the day to keep up appearances.) Elsewhere, Apnas comes off as a languid, no-frills guy, waving the promise of doing something new with the British crime drama, then ticking all the genre’s boxes, from gun-toting thugs to gangsters who sit in garages feeding cash meters with wads of cash.

James Greaney stars as Uwais, a visionary British Asian accountant in Manchester, who begins an exciting new life as a ‘launderer’ in his uncle’s drug empire, laundering drug money using cryptocurrencies. Except that Owais actually embodies the stereotype of the mild-mannered accountant, as it is his cousin Majid, aka MK (Asim Ashraf), who lives the high life, taking on rivals and generally putting on a flashy show of being a drug dealer, much to the despair of his father, who hides his criminal network behind the façade of being a prominent politician in Pakistan.

Ultimately, Apnas’ resources aren’t quite stretched to meet her ambitions in this sprawling crime saga. It’s got a lot of facade and grit, and there’s an interesting family drama involving Uwais dealing with issues around his identity as a second-generation British Asian. His father Aslam (Nitin Ganatra) is a taxi driver and has high expectations for his children: Owais to be financially successful and a good marriage for his sister. Her diary lends the film a voiceover, but it is a weak link, partly because her character is thinner than the paper of the pages she writes her diary on.